The Off Season

For the college swimmers, it’s now the Off Season, that hallowed time of year when waistlines explode and GPAs can implode.

Seriously, despite ALL the complaining ALL season long about the cramp that swimming puts into their academic schedule, the minute these kids get handed an extra 3-5 hours a day for the remainder of the semester (not counting nap time), Mr. Coach has found that some of them have problems staying academically motivated. More than one Dean’s List student has looked at that long, uninterrupted chunk of afternoon time and decided that it’s best spent in the company of Mr. Nintendo, rather than Mr. Organic Chemistry Textbook.

Time management is like a muscle that works best when it’s being exercised strenuously. You know how sometimes it feels harder to swim or run slowly than it does to go fast? Well, the Off Season is like a world-class sprinter who only needs to walk across the street now but gets confused, wanders straight into traffic, and ends up on the front grill of an ice cream delivery truck.

Thankfully these days Mr. Coach has a large group of highly committed geeks who beat up on any teammate who threatens to deflate the team GPA even one-tenth of a point (they’re also keeping close tabs on the visiting recruits and making sure that Mr. Coach isn’t letting anyone who’s brain dead into the Class of 2013).

At the same time, a couple of these geeks have decided they also need to cram a little more excitement into this year’s Off Season by swimming the English Channel.

“Oh, that Mrs. Coach,” you are chortling to yourself. “Always the kidder.”

No, I am not kidding. Two of the guys are preparing to swim the English Channel in relay fashion this summer. “W-W-Why?!” you ask. Well, you can go to their Web site and find out for yourself and maybe even get involved in the Channeling Peace Initiative. I’m still at the point where I’m trying to wrap my brain around the fact that even though neither one of them will do a 400 IM unless threatened with bodily harm, they want to swim the English Channel.

Oh, and guess who they’re taking to pace them? That’s right. Mr. Coach. He can get in and out of the water (into the pilot boat) and wear a wet suit (they can only wear Speedos and Crisco), but still. It’s the frickin’ English Channel. 21 miles wide and a pleasant 59 degrees Fahrenheit. If the hypothermia doesn’t get you, the oil tankers will. And then I’ll have to change the title on my blog to “The Mrs. Late Coach Chronicles.”

Anyway, there you have it: the Off Season. It’s the time of year when athletes and the ding-dongs who coach them lose control of their minds.

I'm a Dara, You're a Dara

Dara Torres probably doesn’t realize it but one of the greatest achievements of her sports career to date isn’t something that will be recorded in the record books. It’s not even the medal haul she took home from Beijing (or Sydney or Barcelona, Seoul or Los Angeles). Heck, it’s not even the fact that she acquired her last three out of 12 career Olympic medals at the age of 41, and is now barreling on in 2009.

No, rather, it’s the fact that she has given women of a certain age a new nickname.

You see, back in the day, a lively gal over the age of 40 ran the risk of being called a “Mrs. Robinson” – a nickname that came courtesy of that classic 1967 film, “The Graduate,” where Anne Bancroft (at the real age of 36) played an aggressively attractive older woman intent on seducing a young Dustin Hoffman.

That nickname stuck for a long time until the rock band Fountains of Wayne came along in 2003 with the song “Stacy’s Mom,” which was a salute to, once again, the charms of an attractive older woman in good physical shape.

And then it just got ugly. Somewhere in the last several years, the lovely term “M.I.L.F.” was coined to describe attractively fit older women (Google it if you don’t know what that acronym stands for). I only know one woman in my 40+ age bracket who likes to be called a M.I.L.F. and she’s got a drinking problem.

Soon after that, women of a certain age got saddled with the term “cougar” when it was popularized by the competition reality TV show “Age of Love.” Cougars are, again, attractively fit but sexually avaricious older women.

Yeah, my friends and I definitely lose toenails to running and burp up pool water because we want to be called cougars, M.I.L.F.s, Stacy’s Moms and Mrs. Robinsons.

But then it happened. The first time came toward the end of the U.S. Olympic swim trials last summer. I was headed into the fieldhouse one day and a friendly college kid asked me, “Hey, Dara, you coming to swim?” His greeting caught me unaware, but I quickly smiled, held my head up a little higher and said, “Why, yes. Yes, I am, thank you.”

A few days after that, it happened again. Somebody at a kids’ swim meet, knowing that I swim, asked me, “Hey, Dara, how are the workouts going?” Since then, I have heard of other women – always of a certain age – being called “Daras” and always in the nicest possible way. It is definitely a nickname change we can all live with.

Oh, but Dara? Any time you feel like slacking off and letting those abdominal muscles go to seed, we won’t love you any less.

The Mother Mystique

The role of the mother in sports-related genetics has gotten increasing amounts of attention from scientists in recent years.

Yes, obviously all athletes have mothers. And yes, the word is out that a lot of coaches look at the mothers if they want to know what kind of body an athlete might have when he or she has finished growing. That’s because scientific research has proven that all kinds of physical traits get passed on primarily through the mothers’ chromosomes. Let’s call it the “Mother Mystique.”

Specifically it’s something like the mom’s mitochondria determining how much bang for the buck a person gets when they exercise, but I’m a little fuzzy on the details because the last time I heard this lecture was during labor when Mr. Coach got to chatting with the nurses.

Note to other women: Do NOT bring a professor of exercise physiology into the delivery room. They’ll be all like, “Well, honey, the physiological reason you’re feeling pain in that region of your body right now is because your discombobular artery is pressing on your parapsychopelvic nerve but maybe if you try a little more biosystematic oxygenation....” At which point the wife of the professor of exercise physiology tells him to do something NC-17 with HIS parapsychodiscombobular whatever.

But there was also something in there about why Mr. Coach was sure the newest Coach family member (then in transit) would resemble his mother in the body department – i.e., longer, leaner, more sarcastic. And so far, he’s been right.

Little Mr. Coach is pretty much a carbon copy of his mother (but with a much bigger Pokemon card collection). Little Miss Coach is more of a mix of both parents’ bodies but does seem to be lengthening out like me, the older she gets. She also has transitioned from swimming into ballet, and I can tell you those people are even more fixated on the Mother Mystique than swim coaches are.

But a lot of mothers of prospective college recruits (and ballerinas) freak out, thinking their children will be penalized because Mom doesn’t fit her high-school jeans anymore. They shouldn’t. That’s because no matter what the effects of time or Twinkies, your underlying bone structure and body type will be readily apparent to any halfway decent coach. If you want to go on a diet or start exercising more, do it for you. Don’t do it for some dumb college coach.

In the meantime, if you’ve got a kid with a modicum of talent in any physical endeavor, do what any loving mother should do – never let the father forget who the kid gets it from.

The Numbersaholic

For me, the hardest part about joining the swimming world has been the numbers. Now I’m as much a numbers freak as any kid who ever memorized 20 years of American League East baseball team starting lineups (oh, like you never did that). I also grew up with a subscription to “Track & Field News -- The Bible of the Sport” with its monthly pages and pages of results and rankings. In college, I added the UK’s “Athletics Weekly” to my reading list, which gave me even more numbers to digest. Yum!

But here’s the thing with those sports’ numbers: Each one generated a fairly manageable amount of data. With major-league baseball, there’s a relatively finite number of statistics that can be measured. And with track, you have two sets of numbers because of the two genders and, for a little while in my youth before metrics took over, I had to know the difference between, say, 440-yard and 400-meter times (about 0.3 seconds).

But no sport, I quickly learned after marrying into the swim world, is as well-quantified (some would say as obsessively quantified) as swimming is. You have six bajillion race distances in both yards and meters. You have pools that are either “short” or “long.” You have four different strokes and another that’s all-of-the-above. You’ve got age divisions that begin at Post-Fetal and don’t stop until Worm-Chow. Oh, and then you multiply ALL of this by two for gender. Unless you’re competing at a masters meet that included a regional Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans-Gendered championship, in which case there may have been more than two gender categories but I wasn’t about to ask. Not after what I saw in the locker room.

Anyway, my brain just about exploded the first time I sat down with the meet results from a simple college, co-ed dual meet. The whole way through the three-page printout I kept asking my husband, “Now was that a good time?” and “Was that fast?” And he’d give me these random answers like, “Just look at the third 50!” and “Yeah, except for where you can see he got stuck on the wall.”

It took me years to completely understand these college swim meet results. But by then, I had hatched a couple of baby swimmers and then it was back to the drawing board. My oldest child was 10 before I could look at one of her times and say, with some measure of confidence, “That was...very good, I think.”

But eventually I did become fluent in Swim Numbers. I got to the point where I could read a collegiate conference women’s 100-yard butterfly consolation finals like a dime-store novel. “Ooh, somebody didn’t rest all the way for this one.” “Not a whole lot of fast-twitch muscle fiber in Lane 3, is there?” And “Now that’s what I call a negative split.”

I felt fluent, that is, until the day Mr. Coach came home with the biggest meet printout I had ever seen. It was eight inches thick. At the time, we were living in Australia while Mr. Coach spent his sabbatical working for their Olympic training center (Mr. Coach is also a professor of exercise physiology, so he gets these breaks every seven years to go watch people somewhere else swim). He had been working on a project to record and analyze races swum at their just-completed Olympic Trials.

“It’s the numbers from Trials,” Mr. Coach said proudly. “Every race by every competitor is broken down by start-reaction time, stroke count, length of stroke, turn time, kick rate....”

It was like waving an open jug of moonshine in front of a fall-down drunk and saying, “You wanna little sip?”

Yup, my name is Mrs. Coach and I’m a numbersaholic.

Event Management 101

I have a friend with a problem. Let’s call my friend “Emma” (because that is, in fact, her name).

Some people cope with life’s problems by eating salty snacks (OK, that would be me). Or they take steaming hot baths (again, me). Or they watch the opening credits of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” 27 times in a row, laughing hysterically every time the line “A moose once bit my sister” pops up in the subtitles (that would be Mr. Coach).

“Emma” copes with life’s problems by staging 5K fun-runs.

Not running in them. Putting them on, as in telling some charitable organization, “Hey! I know a great way to raise money!” and then going out, finding a 5K running course, getting sponsors, printing up t-shirts, collecting money and – this part is critical – calling me and asking me what I’m doing at 6 a.m. on (fill in the date).

That’s because, sometime early in our friendship, “Emma” figured out that most coaches’ spouses are born with an event-organization gene in them. Give us a spreadsheet, a Thermos full of coffee and a box of honey-dip glazed doughnuts, and we can herd people into performing feats of physical exertion – and make them thank us for it. I’m not proud to possess this ability, but I almost always use it for good and not evil purposes.

But I thought I was off the hook when “Emma” moved away almost two years ago. Her husband makes a living running universities and he found a new job at a new school (whose school colors, it should be noted, are much more flattering to “Emma” than our school’s, so I couldn’t blame her for letting him take the job).

But, no, “Emma” was not going to let a little something like 822 miles get in the way of 5K event management. She even managed to frame it in terms of her birthday.

“What are you doing on April 26th?” she called and asked me last month.

“No,” I said, “you cannot stage a 5K to raise funds for your own birthday.”

“It’s not for me!” she said chirpily. “It’s for…,” and she went on to detail some truly demented but creative scheme to raise money for a middle-school jazz band that involves people competing in “trios” and “quartets” in award categories named “Woodwind,” “Brass” and “Rhythm.” (Look, I’m only best friends with the woman. I don’t tell her how to seat her jazz bands.)

So, long story short here, today I am going to be somewhere in the New England tundra, relieving the local citizens of $10 a head ($25 per family). But it’s for a good cause: Come fall, when Mr. Coach’s swim team is planning to stage a fundraiser of some sort, “Emma” is going to have to travel here and return the favor. And I don’t care if her new university’s football team is storming the beaches of Normandy that weekend and a $15 million alumni donation hangs in the balance. She will be here if she wants me to keep enabling her little 5K addiction.

The Visual Contact Rule

Mr. Coach has been a coach for a long time. We’re talking centuries now. But no matter how many years he coaches, no matter how fabulously his athletes do, he will never master the intricacies of the Visual Contact Rule. And why is that? Because he is not a mother. And never will be.

Let’s demonstrate the Visual Contact Rule with a factual anecdote.

Every summer, one or both of the Little Coaches compete on a park-league swim team. Every Wednesday evening during those summers, the Coach Family is headed somewhere within an hour’s drive to spend the next 4 to 5 hours on the perimeter of an outdoor pool, watching kids of all shapes, sizes and ages defy the rules of organized swimming.

On one such Wednesday evening, I had some work to finish up with the newspaper I write for, so Mr. Coach was in charge of getting 7-year-old Little Mr. Coach ready and transported to the meet site. I would meet them there later.

I arrived just as the team was finishing its pre-warmup meeting. Little Mr. Coach came over to where Mr. Coach had set up our lawn chairs, and proceeded to strip down for his warmup swim. And when I say “strip down,” I do mean “strip down.” Down went the sweat pants and then up went the sweat pants, and in between those two actions, approximately half the team found out that Little Mr. Coach is definitely a male.

I finished my sip of Gatorade, turned and looked at my husband.

“Where’s his suit?” I asked, screwing the cap back on the bottle.

“You said you had your suit on,” Mr. Coach said to our son.

“I think I forgot to put it on,” Little Mr. Coach whispered.

“He said he had it on,” my husband said to me. “I asked him if he had it on before we left.”

And there, for those of you who aren’t mothers and who aren’t nodding knowingly at this point, is the Visual Contact Rule in, if you will, a nutshell.

“Did you actually see the suit?” I said, more rhetorically than anything else because I knew what the answer was. No, my husband – the non-mother – had not made Visual Contact with the suit.

We scrambled at that point to find Little Mr. Coach a suit because his non-mother had also not made sure he had duplicates of everything (suits, goggles, caps, towels) in his swim bag (although he did have all his Yu-Gi-Oh cards, one fin, two bendy straws, half a candy cane, and a complete Mousetrap board game set).

The 12-year-old brother of a teammate lent us a pair of board shorts. You know how you see those pictures where track sprinters work out with a parachute attached to them, just to increase drag? Yeah, that image pretty much describes Little Mr. Coach’s meet that night.

But at least they couldn’t disqualify him for nudity.

(Instead they got him for swimming breaststroke on the butterfly leg of the medley relay. But it was an otherwise legal breaststroke.)

The Post-Season Plumping

As a naturalized citizen and not a native in the swim world, there are plenty of things I’ve always found unusual about this culture. For example, the whole team cheer thing. I’m not sure there’s any other sport that devotes as much time and energy to composing and executing such elaborate screaming rituals. In track for example, you’d be lucky to get a “g’luck” out of a teammate on your way to the starting line at nationals. With swimming, a simple dual meet is going to yield a five-minute, 140-decibel group meditation on potato chips, strawberry jam and the necessity of achieving one’s athletic goals.

But of the many unusual characteristics of the swim world I have encountered, the one that still blows my mind is the post-season plumping. I don’t think I have ever seen so many perfectly healthy and athletically gifted individuals gain weight as fast as swimmers do once their season is over.

And we’re not talking good or necessary weight gain either. A few weeks after one season had ended, I came home from my daily swim and told my husband I had just seen one of his college kids show up to swim, too.

“Huh,” said my husband. “I wonder why he’s getting back in already. That’s not like him.”

“Well, it might have something to do with the fact that he looks like he’s about five months pregnant,” I said.

“Ahh,” Mr. Coach nodded. “Yeah, he gains it in the belly.”

With some of them, the weight gain goes right to the cheeks and jowls. With some, it goes all over, yielding a nice, doughy look. But with some, it goes right to the gut (there are often, but not always, fluid-consumption choices at play there.).

Mr. Coach has explained that the rapid weight gain has something to do with appetite lag. Swimmers really do consume an extraordinary number of calories when they’re in-season. I’d bet, if you did a statistical study, you’d find that most swimmers consume about the same number of calories per day as yards that they swim.

And when a swim season is done, it’s done. Swimmers don’t leave skid marks when they leave the natatorium for a few weeks (months, years or decades) of rest from swimming. But they do take the appetite with them unless they make a concerted effort to crank it down.

Or, as in the case of many male swimmers we have known, they maintain the caloric intake with diligence until they get to their winter training trip. That’s when the yards swum will exceed the calories consumed and then, just like crocuses in spring, their abdominal muscles once again emerge.